OVMS (the Open Vehicle Monitoring System) started back in 2010 with the goal of providing cellular telemetry and smartphone apps for hobbyists with Electric Vehicles. Our goal was to provide remote telemetry monitoring and control for these vehicles, and to have fun doing it. Back then, we used PIC 8bit microprocessors for both our v1 and v2 designs. Since then, we've gone on to install thousands of these in several different types of Electric Car (including Tesla Roadster, Renault Twizy, Chevy Volt, Vauxhall Ampera, Renault Zoe, and others). We are an open source and open hardware project.

Last year, we chose ESP32 as our new platform, and started working on our v3 platform. It was tough, struggling with early versions of the IDF and all sorts of issues surrounding external flash, SD CARD bugs, etc. Over about a nine month development period, we produced a developer-only batch of first modules, then a limited production run, and today we launch with full production.

We're particularly proud of our firmware. It is still beta, but pretty complete. We've got a full textual command line interface, including full-screen text editor, configuration system, tracing and logging support, ssh remote access, 3G cellular support, and web server. With wifi, mdns and ssh server support, remote access is a breeze. The module itself is a drop-in replacement for the older v1/v2 versions, using the same cabling and antenna arrangements. We've spent a lot of time optimising the behaviour of the network stack so that it seamlessly switches between cellular and wifi.

With wifi, SD CARD support, three CAN buses, and simulation, logging, and reverse engineering tools built in, this is the perfect tool for vehicle CAN bus hackers.

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Espressif Systems is a fabless semiconductor company providing cutting-edge low power WiFi SoCs and wireless solutions for wireless communications and Internet of Things applications. ESP8266EX and ESP32 are some of our products.